Spray.se

» see spray.se as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Spray's big years line up almost exactly with my first ones online, but it was a Swedish thing and it stayed one. i got on the internet in 1998 over a modem in Turkey. Spray was already the loud confident face of the Swedish web by then, and none of that confidence had any reason to reach me. it was a portal in a language i do not read, for a market on the other end of the continent. i only met the name years later, going through the wreckage of the dot-com boom.

and what a boom it had. Spray started in 1995 in Stockholm, set up by Jonas Svensson and Johan Ihrfelt after they left Kinnevik, as a kind of internet consultancy that pulled in more founders as it grew. it turned into one of the definitive Swedish dot-coms, and at the peak in 2000 the thing was valued at somewhere around four billion dollars, almost all of it on paper. the portal it ran, spray.se, launched in 1999 under the slogan "here begins the internet," and for a moment that was not even arrogant.

then the market did what the market did in 2000 and 2001. the paper billions evaporated, and Spray stopped being a giant and started being an asset that got sold. Lycos Europe bought it in 2000, near the very top, and that is the moment the story turns from a rocket into a long slow descent through other people's balance sheets.

this is where it gets undignified in the ordinary way. Lycos sold the Swedish portal to a magazine publisher in 2006. it got merged with another old portal, and after a couple more owners it landed with a small mail company by 2018. through all of it spray.se kept running as a webmail-and-portal address for a shrinking base of loyal Swedes. it did not get shut down so much as forgotten, and in 2022 a server crashed and nobody with the keys decided it was worth bringing back.

~ the dossier ~

~ what it became ~

the part worth keeping is where the people went. some of the founders and early Spray hands turned up years later inside King, the Stockholm studio that made Candy Crush. the Swedish dot-com that burned four billion in paper money did not leave much of a portal behind, but it left a roomful of people who had learned how to build web products at scale, and a few of them went on to build one of the most played games on earth.

~ the long tail ~

spray.se hung on far longer than the boom that made it, which is the odd fate of a lot of these portals. the giant died in 2001 in every way that mattered to a stock ticker. the website kept breathing for another twenty years as a quiet mail service, passed hand to hand, until a machine failed and the silence just held. by then almost nobody was looking. "here begins the internet" turned out to be a slogan the internet outgrew, and it ended not with a shutdown notice but with a crash and a shrug.

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